Prior art classification of security sensitive documents, data bases and printed documents and other data in both electronic and non-electronic form involved (a) classifying words, terms, ideas, icons or images into one of several security classifications (for example, a simple classification is top secret (TS), secret (S), confidential (C), and not confidential or not classified (NC)); (b) reviewing the target document, and (c) labeling any paragraph having any given security sensitive word, character or icon at the highest level for the security sensitive word, etc. found in that paragraph. With the advent of significant numbers of electronic documents, this crude security implementation is in conflict with certain legislative mandates to share information among wider groups of people and organizations. Examples of these mandates to share information relate to the home land security laws promulgated after the World Trade Center terrorist attack and the disclosure or non-disclosure laws in the healthcare and health insurance industry. With respect to homeland security measures, the law and regulations generally require that lower level security information (S,C data (secret data and confidential data)) be shared widely throughout the law enforcement community, particularly with local enforcement agencies. In contrast, the legislative and agency mandates in the healthcare industry and the health insurance industry mandate that before an individual's healthcare record is shared between companies, organizations, doctors office etc., the individual health record be expunged or sanitized. Generally stated, the healthcare industry mandate is to eliminate personal identifiable information from the healthcare record.
In the two examples discussed above, it is desirable to utilize and implement a risk monitor system or program, which can assess, prior to the release of target data, the degree of risk associated with the release of security sensitive words, data objects, characters or icon which may be part of the target data.